I try to walk on the beach every day and sift around and notice. Each day it brings something new:  the sky a tangy blue I’ve never quite seen before, a sunrise on a seven degree morning that brings with it a passel of intrepid and boisterous ducks paddling along through icy chips and salty sea, a clutch of barnacles riding along on a broken shell, a man marching across a mucky sandbar, shovel over his shoulder, ready to clam, rain drops collecting on fence post rose bushes that line a boardwalk. 

I decided to photograph the beach every day for a year to find out what it might tell me, to see what I might see, a simple stretch of shoreline with a daily story to tell. 

http://eachdaynewgrace.tumblr.com/

"What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time."  ~ President Barack Obama, 1-21-13

It's Not About the Bike

It's not about the bike, I guess we've all figured out as much. 

But what was it about?

I was taken immediately with Lance Armstrong's story when I read his memoir
It's Not About the Bike. This mischief maker with energy to burn was once

so unable to be contained his mother said, as mothers do, go on! Take your bike; go for a ride! So he did, he road for miles and miles and miles and miles, ending up many towns away and when he reached his mother by phone, she told him essentially, you got yourself there, now get yourself back. 

I thought about how the bike took him along all those Tour de France routes, up and down the Alps or the Pyrenees, speeding through the lovely French villages, through the time trials, 2,000 miles over 21 days. How he won the tour  seven times in a row and that was after he beat cancer in a harrowing, intense fight. 

I remember doing the same thing I did when I first read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. At one particularly wrenching moment in the book, I had to look at the inside back cover to see McCourt's photograph, to assure myself he'd actually survived the hunger and heartache he was describing. You lived through that? I did the same  after reading about Armstrong's cancer battle. You lived through that and then won that race seven times in a row? How could that be?

Like many people, I bought into the story fully. I ordered a box of Livestrong bands and everyone in our extended family wore them to honor a family member we all loved. 

Lance Armstrong won a grueling battle against a terrible cancer. He went up and down those mountains, sprinted those time trials, raced thousands and thousands of miles on the bike. And yet...it turns out he didn't really win. 

So what, then, was it really all about?

On the morning after the "world-wide exclusive" interview that four million of us watched, I woke early. The  little cafe and gas station across the street were opening; the city bus roaring by again with people heading to work, the fishing boat was out in the water just off the coast a couple blocks away. 

It was just a bit past dark on a windy, wintry Friday morning and the mechanic and his son, the bus driver, the cafe owner, the short order cook, the occupational therapist and the house painter were off to work as usual. 

There wouldn't be a medal, endorsements or a world-wide exclusive, but there was a truth to it. Something to admire and believe in. 

The trees seemed to be dancing,
lassoing the wind,
scribbling on the sky.

A New Morning, a New Poem

In his poem "Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg," the poet Richard Blanco conjures up a chance meeting between Tia Olivia and the poet Wallace Stevens. When she serves him up an egg, he questions its color, the yellow of it so unlike other yellows he has seen. The woman gets fed up with Stevens' questions, his search for the exact color and his search for words. So she bursts open the yoke by "plunging into it with a sharp piece of Cuban toast." It's yellow, she says. "Amarillo y nada mas, bien?" (yellow and nothing else, ok?) 

The colors she has unleashed begin to spill and travel, the egg yolk becomes like lava, carrying off all kinds of things in its wake, "cafeterias, 57 Chevys... mangy dogs...park benches," all the way to the sea. In the end, Stevens relents and says that yes, it is yellow. Then he asks her what about the color of the sea? The poem brings up such intriguing questions about language, about color, about words and what they mean for each of us. It made me think of the insistence of place both in the world and society. 

I loved the zest of the aunt and the persistence of Stevens and how Blanco decided to put the two of them into a poem in the first place, tangling over the color of an egg yolk and so much more. 

This morning it was announced that President Barack Obama asked Blanco, a civil engineer and poet who is the son of Cuban immigrants, to create and read a poem at Obama's inauguration January 21st. I was happy to hear that the inauguration will be infused with art and that we will all have a poem to untangle, words to sort through and take meaning from, a poem to carry with us. 

I remember listening to Maya Angelou's 1993 inaugural poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," as she spoke of  "A Rock. A River a Tree."  Her poem called each of us "a bordered country, delicate and strangely made proud." In the poem, the river sings and sings and asks us to come and rest by its side.

I wonder what Blanco's poem will tell us, what it will ask. 

                                                       ~            ~          ~
http://www.richard-blanco.com/

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168899347/richard-blanco-will-be-first-latino-inaugural-poet

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/books/richard-blanco-2013-inaugural-poet.html?_r=0

http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/rblanco.html

http://poetry.eserver.org/angelou.html

~ Poetry on Wednesdays

Marlene and Paul 3-11-60? 63? 65?. I'm never quite sure what that
last number is. Has this message been on this rock for more than 40 years?
Was it a teenage dare back in the `60's? A 10th anniversary message?

Maybe it was a passing fancy, a crush that lasted just a moment.

I like to think that maybe they have had 47 years together; perhaps they've
weathered all the same kinds of things the rock has, harsh storms, warm
summers, shifting sands, new days, together.

I like to picture an older Marlene and Paul visiting the place where they
dashed down to the beach with a small can of black paint, all those years
ago, rebelling a bit one night, leaving their mark. Do they smile
and think, `Well look at that, we're still us, all these years later.'  

I love the small gifts nature
leaves us.     

Making tracks.

A professor once said to a whole class of writing students,
"You want to write? Then read. Read it all. Read everything."
Sounded kind of daunting.
But she went on: whenever anything you read is particularly good,
notice it. Try to find the exact moment it's good and then listen.
Listen hard and you may hear just what the writer is up to.
They'll be your best teachers, she said, if you listen closely
enough.

So today I was lucky enough to listen to Joel Lovell who wrote a piece on the
short story writer George Saunders in The New York Times online.
I wanted to lean in and listen all afternoon, the article had so much to say about Saunders, about his life and his work and what writing is and even, what it means to be us, people just trying in every way to get by and the grace of connection books can give us. It was one of the most thought-provoking and tender pieces of writing I've read in the longest time.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?hp&_r=0 

The Times had many beautiful pieces in its annual "The Lives They Lived" Sunday magazine, paying tribute to people who died in 2012. Sandra Cisneros began her tribute to singer Chavela Vargas this way: "Once, when Mexico was the bellybutton of the universe, Isabel Vargas Lizano ran away from home and resolved to make herself into a Mexican singer." How could I not read what came next - a piece as vibrant as Vargas seemed to be.  http://nytimes.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

We Can

I passed this wry mural in Chicago, around the corner from a nifty
little coffee place/donut shop. Looking at the photo today, I smiled
at Rosie the Riveter, not because the shop had her hawking donuts,
but I was thinking of the convening of the 113th U.S. Congress this week
and the 100 women who are members, the most ever.

Rosie came to represent all the women who walked into workplaces they
hadn't necessarily been before, at least in those numbers back during
World War II. They were women who had to roll up their sleeves, learn a new
trade and, for many, a new way of life. Their rallying cry? "We can do it!"
and they did.

I wonder about the 20 female senators and 80 members of
the House of Representatives in our newly seated Congress.
Will "we can do it" be the phrase that defines them? We can...move forward,
make change, begin to solve some of our nation's most challenging problems?

What I'd hope for is a slightly different mantra, something like
we can try together.

"The street is chic,"
said the cheerily tattered sign
on the rugged storefront
on the pretty street.

Transcend

Fearless Felix.

Now there’s a nickname. How can you not pause when you hear it, take note and wonder?
Fearless? Fearless how?
Well, as we know in the case of Felix Baumgartner, utterly fearless.

I thought of Felix today when I saw a commercial for Google. The ad was encouraging us to search and, of course, to use Google to do so. But I saw another message for the new year in the montage of moments from 2012, as each sped so quickly by: reach, stretch, go, try. And if you sing a song or
dance a little kooky when the moment strikes, all the better.

I hadn’t had Felix Baumgartner on my radar earlier this year; I was half listening about his attempt to break the speed of sound. Then, ha, I Googled him, and I saw what he was up to and started listening. He was going to travel up to the very edge of space in a balloon, 24 miles into the sky.

On October 14, 2012, he would step off the platform built for his attempt and fall , as it has been described, "into the arms of the universe." He would be jumping/flying/hurtling to the ground at speeds of 833 miles an hour with no plane. He’d have a specially designed pressure suit and helmet and a parachute for protection. He knew all about the risks: his blood could boil; his bones could break; the balloon taking him up there (with plastic described as thinner than most sandwich bags) could falter, the suit could rip. I get trembly at times in rush hour on I-95.

What he also knew was that he had science behind him, that this wasn’t just a stunt, that five years of research and practice and teamwork had gone into it. Great minds merged, just as others had to create the Curiosity rover, still roaming about on Mars.  Even Joe Kittinger, who tried to break the sound barrier back in 1960, collaborated on the project and was in mission control that day to support him.

Who dares to take such a leap? Felix did. He stood there, alone, all that way up. He stepped off. He started spinning and had to use all the skills he had to figure out how to stop so he’d stay conscious and he did.

He road the air at about 300 miles an hour faster than a typical passenger airplane and he landed in a New Mexico desert. He knelt there in the scrub grass and sand and raised his fists. Millions of people around the world watched.

The purpose of the jump? To transcend human limits. In my list of resolutions this year, none will transcend human limits! But some require me to transcend my own. That’s what’s cool about a new year, that chance.

Later Fearless Felix said, “Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.” Or how grand. He – and his team - stretched toward something that wasn’t quite possible
and then it was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_MUB8adEQ